Otherworldly Maine (10 page)

Then Ben cranked up the throttle and we headed back to the dock at The Cabana.

Dan and Ted met us there and helped us out, half-carrying, half-dragging the pilot across the lawn and into the restaurant.

Once inside, Dan and Ben sat the man down and started pouring coffee into him. Ben took his jacket off him and Dan went out into the kitchen where he found a pile of dish towels, which he used to wipe his face and hands.

The pilot, a young guy compared to us, no more than forty or so, was dazed and his few attempts at speech weren't effective. About all he managed at first was a weak “Thank you, thank you,” which set him to coughing up some of the lakewater that he'd managed to get into his lungs.

Meanwhile, Ted clambered up the stepladder to finish what he'd started earlier. I stood by to keep him from falling down, and a few minutes later we had a picture on the television—one of those big flat things with the Perfect Crystal screen on the dining room wall—with a pretty blonde newscaster and pretty red and blue graphics.

The only problem was that she was speaking French.

“Any idea what she's saying, Dan?” Ted asked.

“Sorry, I never did know much French,” he said.

“Don't look at me,” Ben chipped in. “All I ever learned was enough to get in trouble with the girls down on Lisbon Street.”

“Ayuh, and now you'd have to know Somalian to get into trouble down there,” I said.

“Shouldn't we call the state police or someone about this guy?” Dan asked as he wrung the water from one of the dish towels.

“You mean so they can catch us watching Canadian news and lock us up?” Ted said.

“It's not like you'd be that far away,” Ben said. “They turned that old Girl Scout camp at the north end of the lake into a detention center, you know.”

“No,” Ted said. “I didn't know that.”

“You bet,” Ben said. “They chased the Tripp girls away from there last month when they went up to pick blueberries. Followed them home in a big boat and brought them in for questioning. The girls told them that terrorists don't eat blueberries. They didn't seem too amused, from what I heard.”

“They grabbed Emma Tripp a week later after she sounded off at Cormier's,” I said. Cormier's was the little general store at the top of the hill from our cottage. It had a little post office in the back where we got our mail every day—after we got back from fishing. That was their excuse for grabbing Emma: Causing a disturbance at a federal facility, to wit, the post office at Cormier's.

“I heard about that, but none of the details,” Ted said.

“Well, they can come for me any time they want,” Ben said. “I'm their worst nightmare—a baby boomer from Maine with nothing to lose.”

“Except your Social Security,” Dan said.

“They take that away and I'll just go build myself a tarpaper mansion out in the woods and live by candlelight,” Ben said. “I've done it before, you know, and I can do it again.”

“You know what they say—you can tell someone from Maine, but you can't tell them much,” I said.

“And it only gets worse when we get old,” Dan said. “I've told you before about my father's uncle down in Wiscassett. He was 95 years old and the oldest plumber in America. Had to walk to work because they took away his car. He hung up on Barbara Walters because she kept asking so many dumb questions. His son worked for him. When he turned 65, he said, ‘Dad, I want to retire.' His father said, ‘Not 'til I do.'”

“If you ask me, they've been locking up way too many people for no reason at all,” Ted said. “Just for things like watching hockey on Canadian TV And I still don't know why they cut off the cable.”

“The government's been pissed at them ever since they shot at that icebreaker trying to run the Northwest Passage after the Canadians told them not to,” Dan said.

“Hey, look!” Ben said. “They're talking about Alaska.”

He pointed at the television where a map of Alaska had popped up beside the newscaster's face. It zoomed in on the southeast panhandle, that narrow strip that sticks down towards the continental U.S., with a star marking Juneau.

The star turned into one of those red circles with a slash through it. A few words in French were inscribed below it, but not any that I recognized.

Then I noticed that the half-drowned pilot was watching the TV with us, reaching out with one hand to point at the screen.

“Alaska,” he said. “I'm from Alaska. Sitka, Alaska.”

“Well good for you,” Ted said. “You sound like you're getting your wits back after that crash.”

“But this isn't Alaska?” the pilot asked.

“Afraid not,” said Dan.

“Then where am I?

Only in Maine could you give him an honest answer that would only confuse him, and Ben did just that, quickly and without thinking.

“West Poland,” he said.

The pilot's jaw dropped and his eyes grew large and round.

“Maine,” I added quickly. “West Poland, Maine. Near Auburn and Lewiston.”

It didn't help.

“You mean I'm not in Alaska?” the pilot asked weakly. “But . . . but. that's impossible. I took off from Sitka this morning. I can't be in Maine.”

His name was Norm Reynolds and he lived in Sitka, the first Russian settlement in Alaska, down in the panhandle, about 90 miles from Juneau.

“I took off from there before dawn,” he said. “Headed over to Prince of Wales Island. The sun was coming up and I flew into a bright cloud. When I came out the other side, it didn't look like Alaska anymore. So I came down on the lake out there. Messed that up good, didn't I.”

“You hit your head pretty hard,” I said. “Are you sure you aren't just confused?”

“Today's Thursday, August 23rd isn't it?”

“All day,” Ben said.

“I'm not confused about that,” Norm said with a pained smile. He put his face in his hands, rubbed his eyes, then added: “This is impossible.”

“Not exactly,” Dan said.

“Not exactly?” I asked.

“Not if you look at the physics of it,” he replied.

When Dan was a boy, he wanted to go to college somewhere where people didn't have an accent. So his folks packed him up in an old Volvo station wagon and sent him off to Boston. He didn't like Harvard much. He was too smart for BD and BC and all them little schools. But he liked MIT just fine. Stuck around and went through an ungodly amount of money until he dropped out a semester before graduating. That was the year they were shooting college students. He generally kept his education to himself. I kind of wished he'd done it that morning. But he didn't.

“Scientists have known for years about how the universe is constructed,” he said. “There's eleven dimensions—maybe more, depending on how you do your math. Three of them are the ones we know. The ones that tell you where you are. And then there's time, that's another dimension. But all the rest of them are infinitesimally small. They're all folded up inside the others.”

Ben grinned, and said: “I know that, Dan. You've explained it to us before.”

Dan shrugged him off and continued. “Well it stands to reason that if most of the dimensions are infinitesimally small, then down there everything is already connected to everything else, all in the same place, all together. So if something slips—like across one of those extra dimensions—it could easily end up someplace else.”

“Aren't there laws against that?” Ben asked. “Conservation of stuff or something?”

“Ayuh,” Dan said. “But there's loopholes.”

“Loopholes?” Ted asked credulously.

“If something's too small to measure or happens too quick, it can violate the laws.”

“But Dan, that float plane out there at the bottom of the lake doesn't look too small to measure, does it?”

“I don't know, Dan,” Ben said. “Sounds like an episode of ‘Twilight Zone' to me.” He hummed a few bars of the theme song to the old TV show, “Dee-dee-dee-dee, dee-dee-dee-dee.”

“Old Rod did love those disappearing airplane stories,” I said.

“I remember those,” Ted said. “There was one where the pilot came from World War I and landed in Canada or somewhere.”

“France,” said Dan.

“What?” Ted asked.

“He landed in France.”

“Ayuh,” Ben said. “And another one where an airliner flew over Central Park and saw dinosaurs.”

“What about the one where the bomber crashed in the desert and Bob Cummings spent an hour trying to find the rest of his crew?” I asked.

“That was a special one-hour show with a write-up in
TV Guide
,” Ben said.

“What about all those stories about people who disappeared?” Ted asked. “That judge who walked around a horse and vanished into thin air? Or the man who came out of nowhere and ended up getting murdered in a snowy graveyard with no one else's footprints around?”

“We all grew up hearing those stories,” I said. “It comes from living up here in the woods with nothing else to do at night.”

“You fellows can laugh all you want,” Dan said dryly. “But there's one thing you need to consider.”

“What's that?” Ted asked.

“There's something going on out in Alaska that the government doesn't want us to hear about on the news.”

“I think I need to see a doctor,” Norm moaned, putting a hand to his head where Dan had placed one of those big Band-Aids on the cut.

“Or a physicist,” Ben quipped.

“He's probably right, you know,” I said. “Maybe it's time to call the EMTs.”

“If we do, they'll bring the state troopers,” Ted said. “And they'll bring the Homeland Stupidity. And I'll end up at the other end of the lake with Emma Tripp in the old Girl Scout camp.”

“Ted, by now someone's probably already called everyone,” Ben said. “There's forty cottages around the lake, and I'll bet everyone saw that plane go down.”

Ted turned white, then scrambled over to the stepladder, which we'd folded up in the corner after he hooked up the satellite dish.

“You know, Ted,” I said, “if you're so worried about Homeland Security, you can always turn the TV off before they get here. They won't know you've been watching the Canadian news.”

Ted's shoulders sagged under the weight of the painfully obvious and he looked embarrassed at not thinking of it himself.

“I guess I could,” he said.

“But not just yet,” Dan said. “The English-language broadcast just came on. Turn it up, will you, Ted.”

Everyone turned their attention to the screen as a new newscaster, a mousy brunette with her hair in a flip, repeated the top story for the non-Quebecois who were tuned in.

“And in Alaska, the government today announced a daring surprise raid by the Canadian Defense Force into the Juneau area just before dawn. Aided by the RCMP, more than five hundred special forces crossed the border near the Alaskan state capital and secured several detention camps in the area. More than a thousand political prisoners held in the camps were freed and transported back across the border before U.S. forces were able to respond. In Ottawa, government spokesmen said the action was taken at the urging of the European Union, the United Nations, and a number of Latin American governments. U.S. officials lodged a protest at the Canadian embassy and threatened unspecified retaliatory actions.”

“Well I'll be damned,” Ben said.

“Hooray for the Canadians,” Dan said, raising a fist into the air.

“I can see why they don't want that getting out on CNN,” I said.

And then all of a sudden I had that image again of the old largemouth bass hiding out in the reeds and the shadows at the bottom of the lake, with my bright, shiny lure flashing through the sunlight, trying to attract his attention.

I turned to Norm.

“Something tells me that you know more about this thing in Alaska than you're letting on,” I said. “You know what they say. You can tell someone from Maine, but you can't tell them much.”

Norm looked up and shook his head. “I took off from Sitka this morning before dawn and flew into a cloud. When I came out, I was over your lake.”

“If you're going to stick with that story, then the rest of us have a decision to make,” I said.

I could see the lights come on in Ben's eyes, but Ted looked confused. “What are you saying, Toby?” he asked.

“Despite Dan's explanation of eleven-dimensional space-time physics, I just don't think Norm is telling us the truth,” I said. “I don't think he's from Alaska. And I don't think he flew out of any mysterious cloud over our lake.”

“He's a Canadian,” Ben said.

Norm wasn't budging. “I'm from Alaska,” he said. “Sitka, Alaska.”

“Ted, turn off that television,” I said. “We don't want anyone to know we've been watching Canadian news.”

“We don't?” asked Ben.

“Not if we're going to stick to Norm's story, we aren't. Besides, we don't want to get Ted into trouble when Homeland Security gets here, do we?”

“We sure don't,” Ted said.

“The way I see it, if Norm is a Canadian and not an Alaskan, he's got a good reason for making up a wild story like this. We've got two choices. We can tell the Homeland Security people what we think—and let on that we've been watching the news from Canada. Or we can keep our mouths shut and let whatever is going to happen happen.”

We looked at one another without saying a word for a long moment.

And a couple minutes later, Dan was on his cell phone to the state police, asking for help for a downed pilot. “And the damndest thing is,” he said, “the guy says he took off from Alaska before dawn, flew into a cloud, and came out over the lake.”

About twenty minutes after that, all the state troopers in southern Maine rolled into the parking lot in front of The Cabana with their blue lights flashing. An EMT rescue truck followed them up. And then a pair of black helicopters that didn't make any noise were landing on the lawn beside the lake, full of Homeland Security officers.